


Valentine's Night

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Valentine's Day Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-12
Updated: 2015-02-12
Packaged: 2018-03-12 03:11:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3341402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is...</p><p>I mean...</p><p>It's just...</p><p>The boys, they are proving long-winded but not excursive or narrative. But I wanted something up for Valentine's for them. This is what they provided. Another of their infinite beginnings, though not first meetings. Welcome to Mummy and Father's garden, on Valentine's Night, in the rain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Valentine's Night

Inside, Sherlock and John and Mary and Mummy and Father and the baby were warm and laughing.

“Valentine’s Day Christening,” Lestrade murmured. He shook out two cigarettes, and offered one to Mycroft, who took it. He lit, and waited while Mycroft bent his neatly combed head over and sucked the fag into flame. Then he lit his own and slipped the lighter back into his pocket.

He glanced in again.

He and Mycroft were tucked into a lych-gate in the back yard, under the little arbor covered with the crabbed, clawed stubs of a well-pruned rambling rose of some kind. He wasn’t sure why they were there. It was too small for Mycroft to deploy his umbrella, and not much sense deploying it even if he could have. The rain, such as it was, was more mist than actual precipitation. Pale, billowing, baggy clouds of the stuff rolled across the fields around Mummy and Father’s house and buried the brick cottage in dank, damp. It condensed on the slats of the arbor over them, on the spurs and spines of the rose, and dripped unevenly down on their overcoats.

Both men were old hands at smoking in that kind of crap. They were British, they were—Londoners now, if not always. Each neatly tented the burning ember and the delicate white paper inside the curve of a palm, behind a barrier of fingers. They raised the cigarette, drew deeply as the inner shell-curve lit up with a crimson glow, then let their hands drop again to hide under the overhang of an overcoat cuff.

A shout of laughter carried out of the house to them, as they stood in the evening gloom.

“Having a good party,” Lestrade noted, calmly.

“Indeed,” Mycroft concurred. Then, amused, he said, “Better them than me.”

His timing was impeccable. Lestrade nearly inhaled the cigarette, smoke, ember, filter and all. Then he nearly exhaled them all through his sinuses. Smoke jetted out between his fingers, and the ember flashed, died down, and flashed again before he got his laughter contained.

“You’re a right bastard, you know,” he said, amused and exasperated. “You time that. I’m betting on it.”

“And it’s a good thing you bet so wisely, or you’d be more destitute than you are.”

“Says the man who still owes me a fiver that Sherlock would find a way to make you come out for this.”

“It wasn’t Sherlock. It was Mummy,” Mycroft sniffed.

Lestrade was in no mood to accept evasive reasoning. “Uh-huh. Who got involved because Sherlock asked her to. And who used information Sherlock provided. Right?”

Mycroft sighed, then said, “Will you accept lunch at Bashir’s, or are you short on rent money this month?”

“I am not ever short on rent money,” Lestrade snapped.  Which was true, but could not be said as certainly of gas money for the car. He smiled, then, though, and said, “Bashir’s is good. I like their sandwiches.”

Mycroft’s mouth turned up very slightly at the corners. He knew quite well that what Lestrade liked was the chicken tikka masala, but having been teased for it he’d grown wary about his boring, predictable taste in food.

And, yet, it was for the chicken tikka masala that Mycroft picked it. Because it made his…

It made his friend so happy.

“You are easily pleased,” he said, dryly, and wiped away a drop of rain that splatted down on his beak of a nose.

“Nothin’ to cry about,” Lestrade teased him—only to be rewarded with a very reproving glance. He grinned. “All right, all right. Easily pleased. That’s me. Simple tastes and few.”

“It wasn’t an insult,” Mycroft said. Then, hesitantly, staring into the rolling white mist and the golden-orange glow of living-room light through the haze, he said, “I’m not… I don’t…” He stopped, and instead bent over the cigarette again, this time sucking too deeply and ending up coughing.

Lestrade patted him on the back—nice, solid thumps like Mycroft could recall giving Redbeard back when the big dog had been alive. Not the sort to knock him off his feet, or light, tickly ones that made him feel crept over, or painful slaps. No—a soft, dull, kindly thud that helped clear his lungs—but mainly made him feel fussed over in a tolerable manner.

After a moment his cough settled, and they were silent again.

“Seen _Kingman_ yet?”

Mycroft grimaced. “I had a private screening before it was released. The rushes we’d got were too suggestive not to. I considered having it censored, but…”

“Aw, come on, Mike. It’s no more you than, well—than you’re John Steed, right? Just fiction.”

Mycroft sighed. “I know. But—it is difficult enough being a peculiar hermit. Resembling a ridiculous spy spoof adds a certain lack of dignity to my ignominy.”

“You’re not a hermit,” Lestrade said, for all the world as though it could be debated.

“Oh, do be serious, Lestrade. I have no social life.”

“Ta ever-so!” The man humphed, and only a faint note of laughter clued Mycroft to the fact that he was not that seriously offended. “Shows how you value my company—I _don’t_ think!”

“I don’t have friends,” Mycroft said, more hesitantly. “I—you do realize that, don’t you? After all this time? I’m quite substantially worse than Sherlock when it comes to that.”

“I’m hurt,” Lestrade said—and this time it was two parts tease, one uncertain part insecurity that Mycroft studied and prodded with wary mental probes. “Crushed.” Then, “Cigarette’s about out. Anovver one, or go in, y’think?” He let his Estuary vowels out a bit, and allowed the v to take up occupancy in “another.”

Mycroft froze, trapped between two equally undesired options. He did not want another cigarette—the first had left his lungs feeling abraded and smoggy and his blood pressure too high. He did not want to go in. He especially did not want Lestrade to go in.

Of the two, the cigarette won. “I’ll have another,” he said. “If you’re staying out, too.” God forbid he trap himself into standing out here in the rain and dark alone with a cigarette he didn’t want.

They went through the ritual again. Glanced at the warmly lit windows again. Listened to Sherlock’s sharp, penetrating voice rising and falling as he laid down the law about something or other.

“You have that,” Lestrade said, cocking his head toward it. “Mummy and your Father. Sherlock. Home.”

As the older man did not—and had not for most of his life—Mycroft remained quiet out of respect. Instead he listened as Lestrade sighed and said, “Prophets aren’t honored in their own country…and sometimes I think countries are not rightly honored by prophets. They don’t seem to see you right. But you don’t value them as you should, either, you know.”

“And thus a tale is told,” Mycroft murmured, conceding the point. “Yet I don’t see any way out of it.”

“We could go in.”

“Later,” he said. “After the cigarette.” He fought down a desire to cough. He fought a greater desire to stomp the nasty thing out. He made himself take another drag instead, then said, casually, “You fit in there, you know. Sherlock’s friend. John’s. Mary’s. My parents adore you, you know. You can go in. They’ll be there with some hot, pink, sticky punch to celebrate the holiday. Father will slip another log on the fire. Sherlock and John and Mary will sneak you out to the pantry and get you a proper beer.”

Lestrade nodded…but said nothing as he drew down smoke and let it out in dragon puffs.

Mycroft could feel the melodrama rise up—the damnable tendency from Mummy’s side to turn everything into something—and as big a something as could possibly be managed on nothing but histrionics and melancholy. He stamped it down, frowning. “You go in,” he said, shortly. “I think I’m going to take a bit of a walk.”

“In bloody this?” Lestrade’s voice was disbelieving. “This? You’re crazy, right?”

Mycroft tossed the cigarette aside. “No. I’ll be fine. I know my way around here.”

“What have I done now?” Lestrade asked, not moving a step.

“What?”

“What have I done to piss you off, now? I mean, I do it often enough.” His voice was bitter. “Just when I start to think maybe, for once, just one of you two will admit I’m a friend—something goes wonky and I screw it up and you’re off and I’m gone and that’s it, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Never mind,” Lestrade said, and shook his head. “Never bloody…” He took a step forward, and Mycroft snatched his arm, unwilling to let him escape.

“What?” He could think of no other word to answer Lestrade’s frustration. “Explain it.”

Lestrade stared at him.

In the dark they were both little more than dim, bulky, bearish figures wrapped up in waterproof canvas and tight twill wool. Glimmers of light shone on cheekbones and brows, and the damp and wet let Mycroft’s poor nose shine like polished glass. He swallowed. “I don’t have friends,” he said, gingerly.

“Yeah,” Lestrade said, dejected, and starting to turn. “You’ve said.”

“No!” Mycroft frowned, and tried again. “It’s like not keeping orchids,” he said.

“What?”

“I’m terrible with plants. Kill them. Anthea thought it would be quite nice and very elegant if I kept a single orchid on my desk. I sat on one. Put a heap of files on another. Poured out a bad cup of tea on a third before remembering it was still scalding hot. The rest just…died. After a time I told her to either buy me a silk one or give up, in the interests of orchid life everywhere. I kill orchids, Lestrade. Thus I have no orchids, and no longer attempt to have orchids. I am an orchid-free man.”

Lestrade cocked his head, grinning, if the swell of his cheeks and the squint of his eyes and the flash of white teeth was any sure proof. “An orchid-free man….?! Right. Got it.”

“I don’t keep first edition monographs, either.” Mycroft said, humbly. “Though people do seem to feel they’re the very thing to give an unofficial official as a thank you for any number of minor favors. I generally send them on to the London Library, though sometimes I send something historic down to the Bodleian.”

“Are you trying to say you don’t deserve friends, Holmes?”

Mycroft considered carefully. “Yes? No? Not—not exactly. I daresay I deserve both orchids and monographs, too—but I’m not good for them, which in the end is rather bad for me, too. I once dropped an entire file of Disraeli’s notes for another novel into a fireplace, you know. Not lit. But—well. They say the soot will never come out entirely.”

“So. No orchids and no first editions, and no friends.”

Mycroft felt his heart thundering, then, and knew that one way or another this was going to end the world. He swallowed hard. “I…er. I have attempted one. Of late. Only one. And…I’ve tried to take very good care of him. But it seems a bit presumptuous to call him my own friend. Rather painfully exclusive. And difficult.”

Lestrade stood silent. His mouth opened—then closed, and he frowned in slow, careful thought. “Yeah,” he said, after awhile. “I suppose it might be.”

They blinked owlishly at each other. Neither ran. Neither advanced.

“So,” Lestrade said at last. “What night for Bashir’s?”

“Perhaps Tuesday?”

“Maybe. What about Friday, though—they’ve got the special that night.”

“We could do that.”

“This fellow. It’s probably a good thing he’s easily amused,” Lestrade said, humor beginning to recover.

Mycroft smiled. “Very good indeed.”

Then, hesitantly… “Your only?”

Mycroft took a sudden quick breath. “My one and only.”

Lestrade muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “Well fuck me!” Mycroft chose to pretend not to notice. Instead he said, “Again—I’m not good with orchids. Or first editions. If—if I’m too difficult for friends, it’s probably best to end it now.”

“How long you been practicing that speech?” Lestrade asked, his voice tight and gruff.

“Years? Seconds. I don’t know. Truly, Detective. I don’t know.”

“Greg.”

“Greg.”

It was ten more minutes of silence and monosyllables before Lestrade took his hand and kissed him. But when he did, Mycroft found he’d been right—the world ended.  And started again in Eden.

 

 


End file.
